Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Will Jim Webb Be Democrats’ Anti-Hillary?

While many, if not all, Republican-leaning realists have—and for good
reason, considering the alternatives—decided early on to hitch their
wagon to Rand Paul’s star, might there be a realist option for those on
the other side of the great political divide? The putative 2016
Democratic primary lineup, dominated as it is by former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, would seem at first glance to offer scant hope
for realists, not least because Clinton herself seems to be completely
held captive to the reigning neoconservative magical thinking on issues
as diverse as Syria, Russia, the utility and rightness of the
surveillance state, and the supposed threat posed to American interests
by the IS group.

Astute analysts like The National Interest’s Jacob Heilbrunn
and former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb have both
written that there are abundant signs that the neoconservatives, supreme
political opportunists that they are, have been playing footsie with
the former Secretary of State, with neoconservative-in-chief Robert
Kagan going so far as to re-brand himself as a “liberal interventionist”
in the hope of snagging a high-level appointment in what he clearly
hopes will be a third Clinton term. And why wouldn’t he? Even a cursory
look at Mrs. Clinton’s record reveals a politician only too eager to try
and turn neoconservative fantasy into actual policy.

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Congress Owned by UnAmerican Foreign Interests

"Conservatives are accustomed to liberals not understanding the zoology of our movement. But the use and abuse of the term 'neoconservative' has exceeded even the high allowance for cliché and ignorance generally afforded to those who write or talk about conservatism from outside the conservative ant farm. In fact, neoconservative has become a Trojan Horse for vast arsenal of ideological attacks and insinuations. For some it means Jewish conservative. For others it means hawk. A few still think it means squishy conservative or ex-liberal. And a few don't even know what the word means, they just think it makes them sound knowledgeable when they use it."